Anthropic Streamlines Enterprise AI Usage
Anthropic announced on December 18 an update to the “Skills” feature in its Claude chatbot for business customers. The update aims to help companies use AI to reduce the busywork of repeatable tasks.
Improvements to Skills
The latest updates make skills easier to use, build, and discover.
According to Anthropic, users can create new skills with natural language prompts:
“Just describe what you want, and Claude builds it.”
Agent Skills Becomes an Open Standard
The most notable announcement is that Agent Skills is now an open standard. This means skills created in Claude can be used on:
- ChatGPT (OpenAI)
- Cursor (AI coding tool)
- Other platforms that adopt the standard
This represents a significant step toward promoting interoperability between AI tools, expanding user choice rather than locking them into a specific platform.
Addressing Workplace AI Adoption Challenges
Anthropic’s move addresses one of the key barriers to workplace AI adoption: scattered tools. With various AI tools proliferating, ensuring skill portability allows enterprises to leverage AI more flexibly.
WSJ Experiment: Claude Runs an Office Vending Machine
In related news, The Wall Street Journal ran an experiment where Anthropic’s Claude was tasked with running an office vending machine. The result was a loss of several hundred dollars, but it provided an interesting case study of current AI agent capabilities and limitations.
Hut 8 and Fluidstack to Build Data Center for Anthropic
Additionally, Hut 8 and Fluidstack announced they will build a large AI data center in Louisiana for Anthropic. The project is backed by a $7 billion lease agreement and will be used for training and scaling Anthropic’s large language models.